Business English: Will vying for a job with my husband ruin our marriage?

A female academic (36) wrote: My husband and I are academics, both working in the same specialised field. There is a big job that is about to come up that we are both well qualified to do. He is definitely going to apply for it and he has said I should apply too ... von Lucy Kellaway, London

... He has been encouraging about it. But I am not sure. If I try, and succeed (and I think I have a good chance), would it damage our marriage? But then, if the Labour party's Miliband brothers can do it in the glare of the media, maybe we ought to be able to, too?

Read what Lucy Kellaway, "agony-aunt" of the Financial Times (London), answered:

There is so much that is wrong here. Academia is the most famously nasty line of business there is, and so it is always advisable to limit the number of academics per marriage to just one. If this rule is breached, it is important that they should be in different fields.

Still, it is rather late for such warnings. You and your husband are in a really bad situation from which nothing good will come.

Lucy Kellaway

You say that you are both qualified for the job, and yet it is he who is automatically applying for it. So your marriage is built on the idea that his career - and his ego - takes priority over yours. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that: It's a system that has worked well for centuries and if you are happy with it, then fine.

Why is he encouraging you?

Yet you also say that he is urging you to apply. Why? Would he be genuinely be happy if you landed it? Or is he encouraging you because he does not want to feel that he is cramping your style? And perhaps he feels safe in the knowledge that you won't be chosen over him anyway?

But your interpretation is rather different: You think you have "a good chance" of getting the job, which suggests that you think you are at least as good in your specialist academic field as your husband is. If you have always suspected as much but kept quiet about it, it would be very dangerous - disastrous in fact - suddenly to put it to the test. So to apply would be a terrible idea.

Can you deal with the situation?

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However, not applying might be an even worse one. Can you deal with the resentment that would come with standing back? Resentment is even more likely to kill a marriage than a wounded ego, as it tends to last longer.

Some of the worst marriages I know are where the woman sits at home every evening, wine glass in hand, seething with rage at how she threw away her brilliant career for her husband.

As for the Milibands, whatever the two of them say about their eternal love, I'm sure their leadership battle will end up hurting their relationship. But if it does, the fallout may not matter unduly. They aren't married; they are brothers. Brothers are supposed to compete. And if one of them ends up consumed by jealousy afterwards, they get over it quietly alone without having to face the victor over the breakfast table and wash their socks.

Aus der Financial Times, London. www.ft.com